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It's perhaps hyperbole to say Google backs up the entire Internet -- but not by much. Google catalogs a tremendous amount of data to power its search engine, but it also needs to make sure it can get that data back in the case of data center failure. Traditional backup techniques don't scale enough, so Google had to come up with its own. In the video below, Raymond Blum, a site reliability engineer, details Google's backup strategy in an hour-long talk.

Of course, it's not backup that people really want -- it's restore. You hear many cautionary tales about finding out your backups aren't working only when you try to restore and discover nothing's there. Google implemented a continuous restore policy, meaning it's always restoring some percent of its data in order to confirm that it not only exists, but is correct.